Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far every new project in the last few years ended up using jQuery because there is always this one ui widget that does what we need and the other libraries just aren't there yet and its not worth the hassle of reimplementing or extending a different library just to not use jQuery.
True. Although whenever I see a jQuery plugin like that I try to replace it with some combination of "components" [1]. There is a lot of progress in that area. There are stuff like : File picker [2], dropdown [3], tip [4] for tooltips and many more. 1 : https://github.com/component 2 : https://github.com/component/file-picker 3 : https://github.com/component/dropdown 4 : http://component.github.io/tip/
The dropdown and tooltips look useful, but FYI it's really simple to make a file picker. Just put a hidden input type="file" on the page, then:
document.getElementById("that-element").addEventListener("change", function(e) {
// e.target.files
});
document.getElementById("that-element").click();